The importance of iconography

Iconography is one of the most compressed forms of communication in a digital interface. In a few pixels, an icon is expected to convey intent, suggest an action, and align with a broader visual language—all without explanation. When it works, users move faster and with more confidence. When it fails, friction appears immediately, often in ways that are difficult to diagnose.

Despite this, icons are frequently treated as decoration rather than interface primitives. They are added late, sourced inconsistently, or judged primarily on aesthetics instead of meaning. For designers, this is a mistake. Iconography sits at the intersection of language, cognition, and systems thinking. It shapes how users scan, interpret, and navigate products long before they read a word.

This article explores how to make your icons consistent, how to match them to your brand, and a few simple rules that you can use to ensure that what you present to the world meets the exacting standards of the market.

Icon consistency

When you build out a design, the iconography that you use to enhance it must both fit the style and be internally consistent.

I'm taking an example that was posted on Reddit and using it to illustrate what you're not supposed to do.

Don't:

• just copy and paste icons from different sets from around the web.
• use icons of different levels of detail
• use icons with different stroke widths
• use some filled and some stroked
• mix black and white with colored icons

Either use just one pre-made icon set or spend the time to hand-draw your own. The latter is almost always going to be preferable as it can be used as an expanded vocabulary for your client's brand. If they already have an established icon set you must use this. If there are icons or concepts that are missing, you must draw new ones that match one to one with the established set.

Let's take a look at a current design and what it is doing wrong.

The icons one the left and the arrows on the right are four different styles. They do not use the same stroke weight or style, do not have the same level of complexity, nor are they all consistent in being strokes. One is filled.

Thirty minutes of illustration yields a much more consistent and pleasing set. These now have a consistent style and size.

On matching a brand

Something which you will often encounter when designing for a website, interface, or printed materials is that your iconography needs to match a specific brand. This can be a huge challenge! Some things to keep in mind while designing around a brand are:

• Maintain a consistent level of detail. If you try to put too much detail in, you're going to get muddy icons that are hard to understand. Too little and they will be too abstract.
• Use color as an accent. Too many colors will make a jumbled mess. Less is more.
• Decide early on the general style and work outwards from there. It's easier to change four icons than four hundred.

Below I'm going to add a few images of brands that I've worked on and icons that I've developed for them.

Five rules for creating good iconography

Design for meaning first, aesthetics second. An icon’s primary job is to communicate intent. If users cannot correctly infer what an icon does within a second or two, it has failed—regardless of how polished it looks. Start by defining the action or concept in plain language, then design the simplest visual metaphor that conveys it. Visual flair should only be added once comprehension is proven.

Be consistent at the system level. Icons do not live in isolation. Stroke weight, corner radius, perspective, level of detail, and metaphor choice must remain consistent across the entire set. Inconsistency forces users to re-interpret each icon instead of recognizing patterns. A coherent icon system trains users how to read it.

Respect scale and context. Icons are almost always seen small and often alongside text. Details that look refined at 64px disappear at 16–24px. Design at the smallest required size first, test in real UI contexts, and remove any detail that does not survive reduction. If an icon only works when enlarged, it does not work.

Avoid cleverness that relies on culture or trend. Clever icons age poorly and exclude users. Cultural references, slang metaphors, and trendy visual shortcuts often fail outside a narrow audience or time period. Prefer broadly understood symbols and reinforce them with labels when necessary. Familiarity beats originality in functional iconography.

Test recognition, not preference. Users will often “like” icons they do not understand. Preference testing is the wrong tool. Instead, test recognition: show the icon briefly and ask users what they think it does. If interpretations vary, the icon needs refinement. Clarity is measurable; taste is not.